jerseycaptain :

To Whom It May Concern (mods, staff):

I'm getting pretty sick and tired of the intolerable, infuriating technical glitches in the fan fiction editing system!  WHEN, oh WHEN are the staff people (read: the webmaster, who appears to be the only person responsible for this) going to SOLVE this problem once and for all??

It's really NOT such a difficult request, you know.  Really. 

I had to delete a popular fan fiction because, when I went to edit a SMALL item in it, the resulting saved edit resulted in the display of the fiction, when read on the site, being SERIOUSLY messed up!  Pages 1-2 read fine...page 3 was BLANK, pages 4-5 read fine, pages 6-8 were BLANK! 

This is going to confuse the hell out of readers of fan fictions.  I am SURE I'm not the only one who's encountered this problem, but it's just not acceptable that it hasn't been resolved.

Time to FIX it.  Not a band-aid fix.  I mean a real, PERMANENT fix. 

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16 visitors have seen this question (1 this week)

UK teh white wolfer, March 30, 2008 at 14: 22 Fan project mod

Whoa 0.o That is odd! I hope this can be sorted soon, I had problems with the way my fics are displayed, the text is SO small and makes really uncomfortable reading but it's normal size in the editor =/

Draco, March 30, 2008 at 21: 54 Questions mod

Another one is text being bunched up. That's happened to me when uploading, then going to check it. But yeah, it is annoying.

Walto Disney, March 31, 2008 at 02: 20 Fan News editor

The only problem I've had is one half will be spaced normal while the other half will have like double spacing for every paragraph. It's not so bad, but it's annoying how I can't stop it. D :

jerseycaptain, March 31, 2008 at 14: 04 Member

Well, I just saw my reloaded fan fiction, "Passing of Togo", and the SAME irritating errors are happening! Is there nothing that can be done to fix this?

Cobalt, April 01, 2008 at 03: 50 Member

Well considering I've had to wait about six months for a reply to my question about my fan art gallery being glitched and pictures not being able to be deleted (I STILL haven't gotten a reply), probably not

jerseycaptain, April 01, 2008 at 05: 10 Member

Lux has assisted me with a way of getting around SOME of the glitches, but this thing sure does need a real fixing!

jerseycaptain, April 04, 2008 at 15: 55 Member

I hate to add this (thought about making it another question, but didn't want that one to be deleted as "repetitive")...but now I'm also noticing that it is impossible to now opt for the "download and read offline" option in fan fictions (any). Also, anyone (including myself) who has posted a cover picture on their fan fictions will find that the pictures do not appear ON the covers. Only on the preview list. Uh, are we gonna solve THIS at least?

Walto Disney, April 05, 2008 at 02: 56 Fan News editor

So I'm not the only one who has noticed about the cover fics. *sigh* I hope all these problems can get solved, and fast.

jerseycaptain, April 05, 2008 at 23: 02 Member

Somehow I doubt it, Walto. Sadly. *SIGH*

Wolflux, April 14, 2008 at 22: 16 Forums sections mod

I can possibly shed some light on the matter. It is a rather lesser known issue that the editor is not very functionable with Internet Explorer, while it still doesn't work properly with Firefox either. I have some browsers to recommend for this, although I am not quite done testing them yet. First is Safari: http://www.apple.com/safari/ This is a lightweight replacement of Internet Explorer, but has all the glitches corrected (although some are still in it). This is freeware, by Apple, and thus far it works wonders with the editor on BS. The second browser I want to recommend is Opera. http://www.opera.com/ This one is more advanced and has less bugs than Safari and Firefox, but doesn't work very well with flash scripts and some javascripts. However, by my experience, it should work fine with the BS editor as well, with minimal glitches. Note: I am not entirely done testing them yet. But currently, there is no real estimate on when this will be fixed (nor has Steet given us any either ;]).

Wolflux, April 14, 2008 at 22: 55 Forums sections mod

Sorry for the double post, but from my experience, these browsers do NOT fix the problems with the covers. It's something Steet needs to fix as well.

steet, April 15, 2008 at 12: 01 Webmaster

When I make a change on the site, I'm not always aware that it can break something else, which is probably what happend for the covers not displaying and the link for offline reading. As for the fanfics cut into several pages, this is VERY difficult to do it, because this is HTML code and there can be MANY different sources (some of them, Word for example, add so many useless tags to their HTML, that it can display entire pages of nothing like you experienced.) I'll try to figure out possibilites to correct this, but it's not as easy as pushing a button.

steet, April 15, 2008 at 12: 04 Webmaster

And the editor works perfectly with IE and Firefox : http://www.spaweditor.com/ (I would be curious on what "scripting mistakes" you're talking about) Although it seems to have some difficulties with very long text, but any WYSIYWG editor has the same problem.

Wolflux, April 15, 2008 at 15: 31 Forums sections mod

Strangely enough, I can't use it properly with Internet Explorer, and Firefox tends to bug it. In IE, the lineshift doesn't work properly, and it can change lines when you push enter by a random number of 1-10 lines per push. On firefox, the type-indicator (that little | ) doesn't appear correctly, and when trying to put in texts from a .docx document, you can lose about a page of it (as you mentioned above), although I have never had this problem myself. There is an update to the editor, however, that I might suggest you add (on the very page you linked), and after trying it out, it seems to be working fine. As you also said, Word adds a lot of unnecessary html tags, indeed. But if the editor is incapable of handling long texts very well, it is most probably not worth using. I will look up on some php scripts myself, and see if I can provide with a more stable WYSIWYG editor. About the scripting mistakes, I was multitasking at the time, and trying to formulate a rant about the banning system (which also needs to be upgraded), and was thinking about two things at once... it happens to me T_T Edited it away. (man, I need to learn to look over my posts). Anyway, as I said, I'll play around with some scripting and see if I can give you an SMF-like editor. Those are quite powerful and can easily handle large blocks of text =) Anyhow, the aforementioned browsers should cause little trouble with the editor as it currently is.

Wolflux, April 15, 2008 at 15: 42 Forums sections mod

Disregard what I said above above making a new editor. May I recommend FCK Editor? http://www.fckeditor.net/ How to use: http://docs.fckeditor.net/FCKeditor_2.x/Developers_Guide It's a lightweight editor that is powerful enough to handle loads of text. If it would be effective on BaltoSource is behind my comprehension, however. [Edit]: This code could need a bit of tweaking in order to work properly, but I take it you will notice if anything does not work beforehand.

steet, April 15, 2008 at 18: 07 Webmaster

I know FCK for even longer that Spaw editor, the problem with it is that it didn't allow to upload pictures directly. (I don't know if it's possible now) Also, the design is pretty awful (looks like windows 95...) and can't be changed (as far as I know) I have already considered the possibility to add another text editor (like FCK) and offer the possibility to switch to one from another in case of problem. EDIT : I have tried the demo page, and apparently there's an option for uploading pictures, although it doesn't seem to work (not even an error message when trying to uploading something)

Wolflux, April 15, 2008 at 19: 39 Forums sections mod

Well, what part images have got to play in a Fanfiction is beyond my comprehension, to be honest. Images are just there to make the fictions seem longer. For Fan News, I can understand it.

jerseycaptain, April 16, 2008 at 06: 40 Member

Well I, for one, am certainly not downloading a new browser to my computer just to accomodate this one site. I think it's incumbent upon the situation to be fixed. I grant you, it sounds like it's not easy, and I actually DO sympathize. But there was a time when it was working pretty darned good (sometime in the distant past). Why did it change? Er...no need for a history lesson though. That was more a rhetorical question than not. Nevertheless, as we all seem to acknowledge, a fix is needed. Good luck with that. We anxiously await something which will end the frustrations we fan writers feel.